On Giving My Word

About the Book

The book is the attempt of a person who spent his life in the priesthood of the church, mainly as pastor, to share his own personal love for the church and its traditions and his commitment to intellectual honesty and an adequate response to the social reality of the present. It should be taken as gift which hopes that it will guide and encourage others in search of spiritual understanding in their own stories..

About the Author

Michael J. Tan Creti was born in 1940 and raised in western Iowa. In 1967, he was married to Jane F. Warnecke and was ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. The former yielded three children and profound partnership in life and ministry. The latter began forty years of pastoral ministry served in seven different congregation in Iowa, Nebraska, and Upstate New York. Twenty-nine of these was spent at All Saints, Omaha, Nebraska. Shortly after retirement, he published “To Make My Self a Word,” which appeared in 2010. The poetry and stories of this collection had accrued as a kind of side bar to him ministry. They are mystical in character, influenced by the English metaphysical poets of the Seventeenth century: Donne, Herbert and Traherne, to whom he looked for spiritual sustenance. After he retired in 2006, the parish asked him to write a history of the parish, which resulted in “The Great Crowd: A Love Story About a Large Urban Parish,” published in 2014. As was true of his ministry, his retirement also seemed to require him to write poetry as a means of sustaining his spiritual life. In the new circumstances of retirement and the shifts in the socio-political world, his poetry was refocused on the thought and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose romantism sought to reconcile science and spirituality and the at the socio-political division in England at the beginning of the 19th Century. His new volume continues that romantic search to find unity between such polarities as thought and experience, spirit and earth, and orthodox faith and the free inquiry of the mind. He continues to live in Omaha, with his wife, Jane, whose ministry since 2000 has been on traditional iconography within the guidelines of the Prosopon School. They understand her art as a ministry in light which complements his ministry in word. Cover: The picture on the cover is the icon of the Holy Angel of God’s Silence, by the hand of Jane F. Tan Creti in the manner of the Prospon School of Iconology.